From the cover:
A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge, and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves.
Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by:
- Entertainment Weekly
- Newsday
- San Francisco Chronicle
- San Jose Mercury News
Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She’s had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend, Mike, now her fiancé, for as long as anyone can remember. It’s with real surprise she finds that, at age twenty-three, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, for a chance to begin again.
That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need?
The Dive from Clausen’s Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the force of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen, out of the blue, in anybody’s life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
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Reviews
For the complete text of reviews that appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere, visit the links at the bottom of the page.
“A graceful writer....A quietly provocative novel....This debut...has a kind of control and austerity uncommon in a first novel.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Engrossing....Packer [has] a naturalist’s vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented....The result is genuine suspense.”
—The New Yorker
“Remarkably assured, utterly winning...Packer’s characters scramble up from these pages as terrifically physical beings, so well does she describe them.”
—The Miami Herald
“Both a colorful chronicle of life in Wisconsin and New York City...and a serious, moving meditation on the nature of love and loyalty.”
—Glamour
The New York Times Book Review